“It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage...”
The raging storm feels like a pale echo of what rages inside Calliope. She's ice and fire, electricity and sharp steel and she's alive, alive, alive. Each circle of the bird brings a torrent of anticipation rising like another tidal wave inside her. Each twist of that deadly beak as it snaps and clashes maker her smile darker and darker and until it's a lion that watches the Thunderbird and it seems strange that it's horse-teeth that flash in the bolts and not fangs.
Finally it dives down, talons first and Calliope lunges into the air to meet it, lamenting for a moment that it's a horn and not lion jaws that she sinks deep into whatever monstrous flesh she can reach. But the bird still bleeds and she bleeds and it matters not what creatures they are but enemies.
And Calliope has always relished in the blood of her foes, smiled to lick it from her lips. She's happy to bleed, to suffer as long as it means that 'they' bleed and suffer more.
The bird though is clever, perhaps more so because it's life might flash like the storm and surely it knows that it will die here(or they will die) and there is nothing left to find anywhere in this place but death. As she rises up to meet the belly on the beast the claws scrape violently at her back. Calliope screams in rage, pain is a distant thing in the throes of war.
She screams and bleeds and something rises up inside her like a lion of magic and she sneers a feral grin to feel the hiss of the storm not above her but inside the chambers of her heart. The storm overhead stars to feels like a twin to her fury and the bolts start to strike as straight and true as her horn and her justice.
The reaper of the Rift has returned.
Calliope sparks like a live-wire and the thunder roars between the bolts of lightning and the beast gives up the battle when her horn guts it and all the pieces of it spill out like a river into the sea. But where the pieces hit her it's not blood that coats her but lightning, it sparks down her her spine and traces the rivulets of her blood like it's not fluid but metal. Her eyes are no longer blue but white, white-hot and brighter than the core of the sun.
Close by Ruth rattles the earth and yet it feels pale to the thunder of magic that rumbles in her bones when turns and sees Shrike and Pavetta joining the battle. How she rages then! To see the blood running down Shrike and the bird lashed to death beneath Pavetta's hooves sparks something wilder than before inside her.
And she turns and watches Raymond dragged behind one, the lightning reflect off his skin and Ruth toss the bird like a stone something else rises, rises, rise from the sea of her fury. They will all die, Calliope vows then to leave not a single bird alive to see another day. It dances in ripples of light through her eyes as she turns to Raymond and waits for the others to find their way through the battlefield to her side.
“I will have them all.” She growls and sounds nothing like a unicorn should sound. She sounds like a storm, like the reaper of monsters, the storm that knows nothing of mercy. Her eyes flash, flash, flash and she almost looks mad with all the blood-lust running through her.
The next bird doesn't get close enough to strike as a bolt of lighting pierces it through the chest. It doesn't even get to scream out a death-knell but the thunder almost sounds like one as the clouds gather a little darker over her head.
@Raymond @Shrike @Pavetta
